Nobel Laureate Calls Data Mining "A Must"
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With the increasing pace of the introduction of new technologies, most Fortune 1000 companies are evaluating the impact of information systems on their strategic direction in the next millennium. One of the most experienced and knowledgeable figures in the technical world, scientist and Nobel Prize winner Dr. Arno Penzias, recently talked about these trends with ComputerWorld, looking to the next millennium.

Dr. Penzias won the 1978 Nobel Prize in physics and was the vice president and chief scientist at Bell Laboratories. He is also the author of two highly acclaimed books on information technology, especially its impact on business and society, "Ideas and Information" and "Harmony and Business, Technology and Life After Paperwork."

In an interview with ComputerWorld in January 1999, Dr. Penzias considered large scale data mining from very large databases as the key application for corporations in the next few years. In response to ComputerWorld's age-old question of "What will be the killer applications in the corporation?" Dr. Penzias replied: "Data mining." He then added: "Data mining will become much more important and companies will throw away nothing about their customers because it will be so valuable. If you're not doing this, you're out of business" he said. Regarding the systems implications of this trend, Dr. Penzias commented: "There will be huge databases everywhere. They will get bigger than processors, so you have to back them up in some mountain in Tennessee at night."

Dr. Penzias's views match very well with the strategic technical direction chosen by users of with Information Discovery's products. The Data Mining Suite has always set the highest records for directly working on the world's largest databases without sampling or extracts. Information Discovery has also pioneered a breakthrough in very large-scale discovery with its introduction of the PatternWarehouse as a repository that holds historical patterns rather than historical data. With it, almost all the relevant patterns in the data are found beforehand, and stored for use by business users such as marketing analysts, product managers, etc. Business users get the interesting patterns as they query the Pattern Warehouse with PQL: The Pattern Query Language. They can begin to access knowledge distilled from extremely large data sets immediately without lengthy training sessions or analytical know-how.

For more information please visit http://www.datamining.com.